Liz Nielsen: Radiance
Photography is an attempt to capture light. Early civilizations left sculptural configurations of stone to frame light during solstices. These can be simple apertures that allow and direct beams of light, or they can be more complicated, specific shapes, like a sword. This was, apparently, meaningful. Stonehenge is the example that comes easily to mind even if we don’t fully understand it. Like fire, humans are drawn to the light and want to manage it.
Liz Nielsen is a conjurer of light and color, creating spectral compositions of visible light and fixing that on paper — usually. Think of crystals hung in the window of a baby’s room with light playing through and refracting colors on to the sill and walls. Some of the artist’s work on view here is anchored to the wall conventionally, and some of it hangs above, seemingly lighter than air. Nielsen works in all sorts of different shapes and sizes; sometimes the work is purely abstract, or sometimes more representational, as it is here with mountains.
We have that with a three work center piece in her new exhibition,Spooky Action at Art Austerlitz, installed in the historic 1853 Austerlitz Christian Church.
The middle panel,”Moonlit Lake," 2019, has been fabricated on FujiClear Crystal Archive Display Material; it’s like a large piece of clear film, hung off the wall, with a color positive rather than negative image that light and color pass through projecting on to the wall.
The artist has taken something massive and almost timeless — mountains — and rendered that as almost ephemeral, as colored light. It is an enlightened search for the sublime.
Also important is her central positioning of the triptych, on the wall above and behind the altar.
Divine.
We are in a former church. The works are big, and they reference stained glass in its translucency or transparency. We don’t witness a luminous but static design as we would if we were looking at the Rose Window at Notre Dame. This is three dimensional. The center piece lets light refract through it to play on the wall. Looking at it takes some work; we have to change position and see outside the frame.
“Sky River," 2021 (left) and “Sky Village," 2021 (right) are the flanking works. They are noticeably cooler in tone than the central “Moonlit Lake” whiter, not yellow. The blue is intense. One thinks of Matisse’s cutouts, but these are landscape and not close up still life. There isn’t white negative space; the backgrounds are dark.
Further a certain amount of ambient light bounces on the surface of the works, reflecting the grids of windows in the room.
The verticality gives the work heft and loft adding to its transcendence. All of this is intended. We are meant to slow down and invest ourselves in looking and seeing. This feels unfamiliar. The experience is meditative although there are few guideposts to lead our journey.
Look. Stop. Consider. Look more and longer.
Liz Nielsen, Spooky Action
Art Austerlitz, Austerlitz, NY, 5 - 29 June 2021
©2021